How to profit from Sports Betting   Sports betting has become more and more popular over the last decade. With all sorts of options available to bet on you can get carried away and soon lose your hard earned cash. But with the amount of information available on the net about players and teams, if you do your homework you can do very well. But selecting the right teams or players is only half the battle. How you back them can mean all the difference between making a profit or  loss over the long term.   The Money Shot, who posts his sports selections on my site by late Friday afternoon is what I would affectionately call a statistics nut. He just loves delving for compelling reasons to back a team in the NRL, Super 14 or Aussie Rules. You may have the time to do the same, but I haven’t, so I always read his comments and if it sounds logical to me I back the selections and have done very well off them.  I have fiddled round with various staking approaches but I have settled on a plan that is very similar to my Value Staking Plan I use for backing the Punt Like a Pro horses, that has made around $7,000 over the last 18 months based on just $10 units.   The first thing to understand is that backing value bets is crucial to long term success. Therefore we have to come up with a price we think a team should be paying, called the Rated Price (RP) then compare that to the price available. I’ll use a real example.  The Money Shot was convinced that Canberra could easily cover the 4.5 start they were giving to Souths last Monday night. They were paying $1.87 when he explained with compelling evidence why they would win easily. He didn’t give a rated price but based on his comments $1.50 would have been a fair RP.  Obviously, we were getting some nice value there. We now have to quantify that value by dividing the price available by the RP. So,  1.87 divided by 1.50 equals 1.24 ( Round to 1.2). So the Value factor (VF)  is 1.2. Now you could just stop there and put 1.2 units on. If one of your units equals $10 you would have $12 on, $100 per unit, $120 on etc.   But to further increase your long term profit I suggest going a step further and doing the following. I have a Rated Price band for the number of units to bet.   Rated price $1.01 to $1.50, bet 4 units times the VF Rated Price  $1.51 to $2.00, bet 3 units times the VF Rated price $2.01 to $3.50, bet 2 units times the VF Rated price $3.51 and over, bet 1 unit times the VF   For example, we rated Canberra a $1.50 chance so we have 4 units on them multiplied by the Value factor. i.e. 4 x 1.2 = 4.8 units.  Now instead of having 1.2 units on Canberra at $1.87 we have 4.8 units. The lower we rate a team, the better the chance it has of winning so why not make the most of any value we are getting?